Abolitionism Defined. The editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a monthly magazine published in Richmond, Virginia, and “devoted to Literature, Science and Art”, defines an Abolitionist thus:
“ An Abolitionist is a man who does not love slavery for its own sake, as a divine institution; who does not worship it as the corner-stone of civil liberty; who does not adore it as the only possible social condition on which a permanent republican government can be erected; and who does not, in his inmost soul, desire to see it extended and perpetuated over the whole earth, as a means of human reformation second in dignity, importance and sacredness alone to the Christian religion. He who does not love African slavery with this love is an Abolitionist.”
(Liberator, April 5, 1861, pg 3)
